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Eric saw it for himself that Sam didn’t have much longer.
And for reasons not clearly understood, it doesn’t scare him away like she’d hoped it would. Because now, aside from Frodo, there was another name on her list of things she regretted to leave behind.
Yet, with all things considered, he insisted on this makeshift life they’d looted the scraps to build. It seemed like a lot of settling down for something that they’re both acutely aware was not even going to last for half of forever. But the recklessness, and the preparation for the future seemed to be a trait they shared in grief; a violent yearning for normalcy stemming from a place of despair.
He’d taken a few bottles of scotch from a convenience store a few blocks down from her apartment. They shared, of course. But it went without words that Eric was using them to help him forget that nothing about those fragmented whispers, those quiet moments they shared, the small talk—were everything but small. They were quite big.
Everyday, he watched her in awe, silent, sitting there beside her as she swallowed down her rage. And it stunned him, endlessly. He bit against his own morose reality that someday, soon, he would not have her anymore. And gone with her would be his narrow chance to say something he isn’t sure he even knew how to say.
To keep it in; this burning secret in his chest, soon started to feel like he was complicit in keeping a sentient thing, with a life and a heartbeat of its own, in suffocating captivity.
It was slowly killing him, watching her slowly die.
(Sam can tell, each time he knocks back another glass of scotch, that he does it in hopes that he could make this hurt a lot less.)
She rose from the couch where she’d been watching him, uselessly hunched over the counter and trying to recuperate from the liquor’s bitterness. She closed the distance between them with her imperfect but graceful impending gait, placing a touch on his trembling shoulder that forced him to meet her eye. Submissively, he does. Because everything he does these days is for her. Everything he has these days is thanks to her.
(It’s all her.)
But he longs to close his eyes whenever she does this; sever that soul-to-soul connection where, just with her eyes, she seemed to roll away the stone that shielded his very being, leaving him to tremble and squirm in his own shame.
Eric often doubts his own strength. He knows, and is quite resigned to the fact that he is not like her. He is not brave. It’s why he doesn’t dare look away, because as much as this hurt him, she was truly the only thing standing between him and his demise. His guilt and his fear and his anguish threatened to make itself known, but Sam made no room for it.
She’s staring directly into the bottomless mirror of his being, wading in the murky waters of his disquietude that she has learned has no definable beginning, midpoint, or end. He’d never seen this version of her before. Plangent. A little sad. Mellifluous… like a rose about to bloom. He feels like he’s drowning in the sorrow they share for having become so helplessly, inextricably entwined with one another. He needs her like she’s his lifeline.
(He knows it wasn’t her plan. It certainly wasn’t his, either. Yet, here they go…)
He felt as though he were being digested by the silence and the chill shuddering down the edge of his spine. She seems to have just the solution, reaching up and plucking one of her earbuds out of her ear.
As her hand draws gently up to his ear, it grazes the sensitive skin there that protects his rushing pulse. Finally, it lands. She holds the earbud there, and then… there’s music. Music only they can hear; a song for the only two people left. Eric hadn’t heard a song in so long. Almost instantly, his eyes are wet. For that moment, the biting flames of his soundless despair fall dull with white relief. He’d not been soothed in so long by sound, the sonic-silk waves of melody and melange, instruments and voice engaging in a staggering dance that he can hear, for the first time, with more than just his ears. He hears it with his entire body, trembling through him like a warm wash of water. And she can hear it too, the very same.
His eyes smolder and his lips pull away into a grin, a crazed kind of happiness for such a small reprieve. Maybe the buzz he gets is partly due to the liquor, but he knows, and continues to suppress that it’s just how he feels when she touches him.
The both of them are adrift in the sea of a life they’d never get to live, but Sam brings her forehead to rest against his; and the warmth of the touch reminds him to breathe, even if it’s shallow and shaky. He lets his eyes close when he sees she’d done so, and he allows her presence to lull him into a sense of security. Like it always does. (And that, without much success thus far, was what he was frantically trying to prepare to be without.)
They cling to each other, swaying delicately to the sound. Their movements are unusually careful, listening out perhaps for that clicking noise nearby made by the creatures, as if, somehow, they could hear their song over the lashing rain.
But though they were careful, they were also daring. It gave them a thrill to indulge in such a forbidden thing as sound. Eagerly and patiently, they made room for it once again. And this time it seemed, sound did not equal peril. This time, it was theirs to enjoy.
Her other hand curls around his bicep, holding him for a type of stability not varying from the reason he lifts a hand to cup her face. He pulled away a little, leveling their gazes.
The city is burning away, but they stay here anyway. They just live. Holding out, for something he can’t pinpoint any sustainable meaning to.
Not here, he reminds himself. A hand, tender from life, and fear and worry, found refuge on the small of her back. His lips skim her forehead, but he doesn’t dare purse them the way he aches to. The way he yearns to with all the fury of a hundred suns. He’s not sure why, or even how it had gotten to this point. But these small moments, where it felt as if their heartbeats were combined to one, were the moments he found himself living for.
Yet as the world collapsed around them, he understood that now was not the time to make that known.
Not here.
Not now.